October 2005

Saturday, October 15, 2005

I am a relatively new blogger, I've only been doing this a few months, and I still don't really get what a meme is. I know it is great as a filler for a post when you can't think of your own pithy entry. But how does one "get" a meme? And can anyone start one? And who began calling them memes?

I like one I saw over at Wonder Mom, so I thought I'd try it myself. It's a twist on Googling yourself. Go to Google and type in your name plus the verb "needs," as in "Kristi needs." It's mildly amusing, and occassionally enlightening, to find out exactly what you really need. I think Google might be a contemporary oracle. The meme just suggests you list the top 10 responses, but I am going to comment on mine:

Kristineeds to look alive.

Kristineeds outside motivation.

Kristineeds to know exactly what time she is to be doing something and exactlyhow it is to be done.

Kristineeds this type of concrete feedback to grasp her own progress.

Wow! How does it know? This kind of constuctive criticism is probably more helpful than any review I ever got while I was a working gal. And dead-on!

Kristineeds to go ahead and get fired.

Well! Thank goodness, I am no longer a working gal.

Kristineeds to be patient.

Kristineeds to bake some more.

I do ask the Lord everyday for patience, it is nice to know that google is listening, too. AND just yesterday I told my mom-friends we need to get together to bake halloween cupcakes for the kids, I told Jimmy we'd bake cookies together, and I told my husband I was craving zuccini bread. I really DO need to get baking!

Kristineeds to go to Home Depot and buy a filter for the exhaust fan over her stove—there is serious grease buildup there.

Thanks for the warning! Especially before I begin baking . . .

Kristineeds A Safari Hat, Chapel Shirt and Khakis.

Hey, It sounds like I am going on a fun trip! Yay! And finally:

Kristineeds to step up and deliver this year in a way that we all know she iscapable of.

Too true, too true. Gosh, is my father speaking through Google now? Or maybe Google got hold of a few progress reports from my school years. I feel like this has been my ongoing lecture every fall since whatever year it was that they started teaching hard math and I stopped doing homework. Now I am in my thirties, and it's the same old story. But you know, I DO need outside motivation, so thanks for the kick in the pants, Google.

Sunday, October 09, 2005

The day after we came home from the hospital with our newest baby, Mary, I turned on a “Love Songs” music channel. As I changed my new baby and then nursed her, a Jim Brickman song came on, and I started to weep. Then came "That's What Friends Are For," and I cried some more.I used to love sentimental songs that get me all weepy. But it had been a long, long time since I had let myself sink into one.For more than a year, I had avoided listening to sad songs, love songs, anything even the least bit wistful.In fact, I hadn’t listened to much music at all. Just a lot of talk radio.Music was just too hard for me.

A year ago last June, I had another baby girl. My daughter Hope, my second child.When I was four months pregnant with her, we went for our routine ultrasound, excited to be finding out the sex of our baby. We found out that our baby had a severe birth defect called anencephaly, a neural tube defect that prevents the skull and brain from fully developing.I was told my baby would most likely grow and thrive in my womb, but may not survive birth. And if she did survive birth, would live just a few minutes, up to maybe a few days.

I can tell you that after news like that, shock and fear will soon give way to grief, and for us, grief gave way to courage.I carried Hope for just over forty weeks, and to our joy and delight, she was indeed born live and wiggling. We held her in our arms for almost three days before we had to say goodbye, and let go of her for good. For all those days, through my labor and her delivery, and all the time we spent holding her and rocking her, we had music playing.We had made eleven CDs of our favorite, most meaningful songs.The day we lost Hope, we turned the music off.And I have not been able to bear listening to it since then.

And then three weeks ago we had our daughter Mary. We brought music for her birth, too, and some of it was the same from Hope’s birth. But it wasn’t until I was back home, alone with my new baby, with post partum hormones coursing through my body, that the music started to overwhelm me. As I cried, and hugged Mary, I realized it was finally okay. I didn’t need to turn the music off, I didn’t have to stop the overflow of emotion.I was happy, and the emotion was good. The tears were good.

Then a song came on called "Bless the Broken Road," by a group called Rascal Flats. It is about a man who is grateful for the wrong turns with the wrong people in his life, because it led him to the love he is with now. He knows that God had a plan for him to make his way down his broken road, and following that broken road was a blessing.

As I listened, I thought of the last year and a half as a broken road. My life, my family, didn’t happen as I’d wanted or planned. And my baby Hope surely, deeply, broke my heart.But there I stood with Mary, loving her so happily, with tears streaming down my face.

If Hope hadn’t come and gone from my life when and how she did, I most likely wouldn’t have Mary here right now. I wouldn’t be the mom I am now, loving her the way I do now. The timing would have been different. My heart would have been different.

I will always love Hope, and wish she could have stayed with us, and grown up with our family. There will always be a gap in our family, a hole in my heart, a special place for her that no one else will ever fill. But that break in my heart--that break in our road--led us to Mary. And as surely as I know that my heart has mended stronger than before, I also know that she is a blessing.

So I will listen to music—sad, wistful, sentimental music. And I will cry. But I won’t turn it off. It is not that having Mary has healed me. But Mary has given has given me back my tears, and brought music back to my heart again.